Shipping cartons of the type disclosed in the present application are commonly employed both for shipping and display of a plurality of articles in a single carton. The articles may be of a wide variety but typically are household products such as liquid laundry soap, bleach or the like.
The use of the same carton for both shipping, and display at the point of sale, is particularly common both in warehouse clubs and in grocery stores where products are sold in bulk form. In such operations, it is conventional practice to package a plurality of articles in a single carton and then place a number of such cartons on a pallet for shipping and/or display.
When the articles to be shipped and displayed are relatively heavy, the cartons in which they are packaged must be constructed to have sufficient strength to withstand the rigors of shipping including stacking and storage. It is also preferable in such instances to provide partitions which keep the articles spaced from one another as much as possible, and, where the cartons are stacked or palletized, they must have sufficient structural rigidity to withstand stacking loads.
For these and other reasons such cartons used in the past have been designed to form a complete enclosure for the articles at least during shipping with full height and width partition elements to provide stacking strength.
Moreover, when such cartons reach the point of sale, they are generally provided with removable top closure flaps and panels to facilitate display of the articles within the cartons, and to permit their removal by consumers or the like as desired. In such an instance, the presence of full height, full width partition elements, which have been deemed necessary for shipping, tend to obscure some of the packaged articles when the shipping cartons are converted to display cartons.
As described above, the prior art cartons presently in use are costly to manufacture and difficult to set up for display. In addition, the partition elements presently in use are cumbersome to insert and difficult to remove. Accordingly, it is apparent from the above that there exists a need in the art for a carton capable of use in both the shipping and display of a plurality of articles. The carton should be more economical to manufacture than those presently in use, and it should be more user-friendly for converting from its shipping mode to its display mode without sacrificing stacking strength. The invention disclosed herein is believed to satisfy these needs.